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Orphans
Asked: 2020-12-04 23:33:42 +0800 CST

Restart-Computer : Failed to restart the computer with the following error message: A system shutdown is in progress

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I have installed updates on my Windows 2012r2 Machine and as usual, I did a reboot. However, it seems that the machine has hung itself during the reboot process and does not do a proper shutdown. I can initiate a connection via RDP, but not connect to the machine, I can also send commands via powershell, so I have tried sending a Force reboot:

Restart-Computer -Force -Credential domain\adminuser -ComputerName COMPUTERNAME

The reply from the server is the following:

Restart-Computer : Failed to restart the computer 10.250.35.16 with the following error message: A system shutdown is in progress.

Is there a way to force the reboot and kill the processes?

powershell windows-server-2012-r2

2 Answers

  1. I found this helpful.

    TASKKILL /S serverIP /U userid /P password /F /IM LSASS.EXE /T
TASKKILL /S serverIP /U userid /P password /F /IM WINLOGON.exe /T

    Even when I couldn't connect to the machine with PSTools, I was still able to connect via WinRM using Enter-PSSession and execute these commands locally.

    TASKKILL /F /IM LSASS.EXE /T
TASKKILL /F /IM WINLOGON.exe /T
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  2. Best Answer

    Turns out that the System Event Notification Services was stuck, and killing it remotely did actually solve the issue:

    pskill \\REMOTECOMPUTER svchost

    First, I listed the running services on the remote machine:

    tasklist /s remoteServer

    Then I started to manually kill the processes with the above command.

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